8.20.2008

This is the first in an ongoing series of interviews with various writers, performers, and artists which will appear from time to time on X Poetics. This interview was conducted via email in August.

RTM: You grew up in Florida and then mostly in SF, right?

Gina: Yes, I was born and raised in Sarasota,Florida until my parents divorced in 1975, whenI was ten, at which point my mother and I movedacross country to a commune in San Francisco’sHaight-Ashbury district.

RTM: Tell me what it was like growing up in withan artist mom in bohemian San Francisco in the70s! And what about your dad?

Gina: Well, I had a great deal of freedom, ridingMUNI alone as a fifth grader. Parenting per sewasn’t particularly on the agenda. My motherpoints out that bookstores in those days werenot full tomes about child psychology – thatall her generation had was Dr. Spock. I’m notsure that she ever actually read Dr. Spock,but there’s no question that I was lovedand fed and encouraged. I felt largelyinvisible, though, in the face of the adultdrama that dominated the era.

My father was also an artist, a New York Jewishintellectual born in 1913. After the divorceI hardly saw him, but he regularly wrote meletters about synaesthesia, art, and animals.

RTM: How did you get involved with experimentaltheater? What got you interested in it?

Gina: My parents directed annual “Happenings”at the Ringling Museum’s Osolo Theater whenI was little. In San Francisco, my motherand her friends were involved with Anna Halprin’sDancer’s Workshop and she taught Spanish atSan Francisco Mobile School, which was a juniorhigh founded by members of the experimentalFirehouse Theater who believed that travel wasthe bedrock of education. The school waslocated in the building that is now Urban High.

I got serious about acting at age 13,inspired by a wonderful drama teachernamed Deborah Dunn at Everett Middle School(then still called Junior High)who co-directedwith Abigail Van Alyn a teen drama group outsideof school that wrote its own plays. In retrospectI realize that the things I most loved aboutacting were 1. the attention, the power ofbeing visible -- I was shy everywhere excepton stage and 2. the sense of community, family,and collective purpose that infuses theatricalproductions. As for why I was interested inexperimental work rather than traditional, Ithink more than anything it was the times.The notion of pushing boundaries and thearts synthesizing was in the air and seemedexciting. Also, because I was so young and soserious, and there weren’t that many teenagersaround whose greatest aspiration was to be amember of an experimental theater collective,I was granted a lot of access and opportunity.

The summer of my 16th year, I visited my grandmotherin Omaha and participated in a workshop production ofa play by Kathleen Tolan at the Omaha Magic Theater,which was co-founded by two members of the famous60s Open Theater – playwright Megan Terry and actressJoanne Schmidman. They asked me back the following yearto tour in an experimental feminist musical about teenalcohol abuse called Kegger that Megan Terry wrote.I tested out of Lowell High a year early to do that.My mom said with pride that she felt like I wasrunning off to the circus. Singer Joan Osborne,by the way, was my costar in that production.

In Omaha I became obsessed with learning about 60sexperimental theater history. I read everything Icould about the Open Theater, the Living Theater, andPeter Brook. Then in my late teens and early 20sI had the good fortune of assisting Joseph Chaikin(founder of the Open Theater) at San Francisco’sMagic Theater and of performing in an Anne Bogartdance-theater production at PS122in New York.I also worked with Nina Wise and Ronnie Davis(founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe).

RTM: And how did you get involved with workingwith Carla Harryman?

Gina: I took four years off between high schooland college, eventually enrolling at SanFrancisco State University as a creativewriting major,where I worked as thestudent assistant at the Poetry Center.Director Robert Gluck recommended meto Carla.

RTM: What plays of hers did you act in?What were those rehearsals like?Who directed the play?

Gina: Only one, in 1989 at New Langton Arts:“There is Nothing Better than a Theory”thatshe wrote and directed in collaboration withvisual artist Mark Durant and saxophoneplayer/composer Dave Barrett, who I movedin with three weeks into rehearsal. Mymemory of those rehearsals is that theywere quite stressful,as Carla was hardto please and pretty clueless as adirector about communicating exactlywhat she wanted, but I loved my poppyred linen dress costume and of courseit was thrilling to meet the man whowould become the father of my child.The text was completely abstract.Periodically one line comes back to me:“The oceaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.”

RTM: You also performed in Camille Roy'sBye Bye Brunhilde? How was thatexperience in comparison?

Gina: It was two or three years later, another excellent dress:a blood red velvet spandex mini. I played Fear, a lesbiansadist, and my lover was named Technique. PlaywrightCamille Roy wrote the part with me in mind. Go figure!The language was abstract, but sexy. We performed ittwice in San Francisco (at New Langton Arts andTheater Rhino and in New York at the WOW Cafe.I remember when we resurrected it for the New Yorktour, that the director,Zack, wanted me to be morevulnerable, which I thought was ridiculous atthe time, but think he was probably correct inretrospect. I officially retired from the stageafter that production at age 23.

RTM: You went to San Francisco State University asan undergraduate and that's where we met. Did youget involved with language writing there?Do you remember or did you experience the "poetry wars"?

Gina: Yes, I had a language poet boyfriend and I took a lotof classes with Kathleen Fraser. The focus on formalexperimentation, of thinking of language as paint ratherthan strictly as a vehicle for meaning,was appealing to mein an emotionally repressed sort of way. It was all soemotionally coy. I was desperate to reveal myself, but myfellow experimental poets frowned upon confession andupon anything that smacked of plot. For me it was moreof a phase than true identity. I was aware of the poetrywars,but didn’t participate other than refusing to evertake a class with Frances Mayes (this was pre-Underthe Tuscan Sun) because she wasn’t cool.

RTM: You worked at the poetry center there while Bob Gluckwas the director? What was that experience like?

Gina: Best job ever! Bob was the best boss ever! I put upflyers around campus and sold tickets at the readingsand Bob treated us to staff lunches at Zuni.

RTM: You used to write poetry. Do you anymore?

Gina: Not really, but I fiddle and fiddle with my sentencesand pay keen attention to the music of the language no matterthe topic.

RTM: I know you've done lots of other kinds of writing and Iunderstand you are working on a novel that you once thoughtmight be a screenplay. Would you describe that work as experimental?

Gina: No, it’s not experimental, other than my core belief thattransitional clauses aren’t that important. I’m working now tounderstand how traditional structure works, like the formula fora romantic comedy. In a sense figuring out plot is like experimentalpoets imposing formal restrictions, like Perec’s not using the vowel e,to prompt creativity.

RTM: How have your interests and motivations around writingchanged for you over the years?

Gina: I want to be literally understood now, which is differentthan when I thought of myself as a poet. Also, writing for mehas become a lot about research, which I love, love, love.Nonfiction (books and magazine assignments)has become myticket to explore the world as much as document it.

RTM: What writing excites you these days?

Gina: In terms of the writing that I’m doing, I’m havingthe most fun with my blog of curiosities. It’s more letterthan journal, and letter broadcast via the Internet feelssimilar to performance –- the buzzy improvisatory riskof committing moment to moment, the taking up public space,the audience interaction. I guess I haven’t retiredfrom the stage after all.

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Gina Hyams is an author and editor who specializesin travel,tradition, and the arts. Her books includethe bestselling travel-design titles, In a Mexican Garden:Courtyards, Pools, and Open-Air Living Rooms and Mexicasa:The Enchanting Inns and Haciendas of Mexico, as wellas Pacific Spas: Luxury Getaways on the West Coast,Day of the Dead Box,The Campfire Collection: Thrilling,Chilling Tales of Alien Encounters,and Incense: Rituals,Mystery, Lore – all published by Chronicle Books. She isalso co-editor of the anthology, Searching for Mary Poppins:Women Write About the Relationship Between Mothers and Nannies(Hudson Street Press and Plume, divisions of Penguin U.S.A.).Gina's essays and articles have appeared in Newsweek,San Francisco, Berkshire Living, Organic Style,IdealDestinations, Healing Lifestyles & Spas,and Salon.com.She has also contributed to Fodor's Travel Publications,National Public Radio, and numerous anthologies.

8.07.2008

There are worlds within worlds, patterns on walls, or just the old regional flim flam. You said I came from the north, but I understood mid-ness, in between. The old wars boiling in your blood amidst statues of Jefferson Davis. Please pause to see me. Please look again. We each papered and credentialed, symbols of stasis and flight. Please pause to see me. Beyond the simple narrative vectors reach out, poke through the skin. Who knew these old pains would find us. Out at the river, even the water has recycled itself. Yet, the old story. The silence of refusal. Underneath your smile. Behind closed doors.

8.04.2008

Lately, in addition to the various institutional settings (Small Press Traffic, The Poetry Center, various bookstores, etc.),The San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene is happening in people's homes. The other night, August 2nd, Tanya Hollis and Taylor Brady hosted a reading by Michael Cross who is visiting the Bay Area from Seattle and San Francisco's own Rob Halpern. What a reading it was too. Tanya and Taylor's flat was packed with people;there were at least 30 of us there. Michael read first. I was not familiar with his work prior to the reading but I am looking forward to reading more of his own writing and the work he publishes as part of his amazing Atticus/Finch chapbook series. As Taylor said in his introduction, Michael's work is rich with a deep and varied lexicon. Cross read from his book Throne in which words like "plinth" recur and alliteration abounds. The sheer pleasure of linguistic jouissance startles as inthis example:

Rob read a couple of short pieces from his forthcomingDisaster Suiteand then from his newly published Imaginary Politicsfrom Blake Riley's TapRoot Editions.The book itself is a beautiful letterpress, hand-sewn work in the unusual size of 10 x 5 inches. Beautiful work Blake! The writing inside is no less astonishing.

I've been reading Walter Benjamin lately and thinking about his angel of history (see quote below**)and then reading Paul Naylor's Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History whose introduction includes a lovely reading of Benjamin's angel which Naylor uses to argue that the writers he examines--Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe, Kamau Brathwaite, and M. Nourbese Philip--are "writing history poetically." I bring this up because hearing Rob read last night brought Benjamin and writing history poetically to mind. How hard it is to mobilize a poetics that can engage history from inside and in a complex fashion and with human scale. Benjamin's angel of history is blown into the future from paradise while it bears witness to the piling debris, the catastrophe that history is. The way Naylor reads it, Benjamin's angel is both witness and messenger. See Michael Cross's review of Rob's Rumored Place (Krupskaya) in which he eloquently discusses Halpern's work vis-a-vis Benjamin.

In Halpern's writing a number of strategies enable the writing of history poetically. The writing serves as both witness and messenger. In Rob's work, the body is the fulcrum. For example:

....We were once ourselves, butthen traversing the trench, a fault between dim pocketsof ruined life forms, I felt something, a kind of mindwithout sex, a shudder with no reference, yr breathtakingcrevasse, a loss I can't mourn, which I've hastily mappedonto this making of waste....So now there's nothing, the shadowof yr name having melted to my cock, their skin, myurethane veneer. The moon, the stars, a spangled heaven,all nesting deep inside the thing's old sunken groin. Ourbodies hewn and, feigning being bodies, sundered byforces real.

The "I" that is mobilized in this writing is never outside looking in but rather implicated and also resistant.

the forest and the rain, yr face, my verdant slick. nothingresembles, nothing to see, an abundance without birds.erection and machinery, no tongue on my thigh, theworld that made you possible, gone now, too. i feel dirty.my soldier running, or my image for that, a corruption inthe record. such clean subordination. broken subjects,surface areas, and coastlines now contiguous with thevastness of that blank, repeating what won't go down

a thing i'll never hear arouses me,begging you to enter the objects i'm investigating. hishair. his wood. his barn. his clover. relics of my rapture,birds remain outside my sentence. you say, i don't believea thing you write. i say, i don't remember myself, it couldhave been anyone--

And then there is something I can only name as love.

Unwinding into national moods, looting all the shitour forms so endlessly fulfill, nursing on withdrawnspectacular slaughter. Now undo this habit. It won't takelong, and then we'll emerge, together, in a hole blastthru the audio feed, our ears, at last prepared to hear,discovered in the mud.

and wry criticism:

Now a word for all my Christian Zionist friends. Love,being a model for the war. Take the IMF, an AK-47 ormachete, my purest intermediaries. Fuck me with thethings our meanings make.

What other writers these days engage with and write from a position of such exposure, vulnerability, abjection, even. But not as a solipsistic, self-aggrandizing pose. This exposure acknowledges and is situated in an address to the other and is an ethical engagement. I suspect that it is the intersection of human relation and the dazzling and horrifying discourse in which we founder, resist, repeat, ask for, use and misuse love and perpetrate individual, institutional and social crimes that takes this writing to the brink of the articulable. Its sheer capaciousness and ability to take us inside engenders hope and awe.

*My wing is ready for flight - I would like to turn back. - If I stayed timeless time, - I would have little luck.

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.from: http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/KhazarDANM202thesesOnThePhilosophyOfHistory